Developing for Elementary OS – Setup and Compiling

Weekends are a great time to enjoy doing what you like to do, ins’t it? I like to code and read and learn new technologies, experience new computer languages, so past weekend I did something that I was planning to do a long time, try to code something to Elementary OS.

Why the Elementary OS? Well, first of all, I like to try new tech stuff, in second, the Elementary OS makes me feel good to use, a strange feeling, different from using another linux distro. I don’t know, I think I’m in love for it…. ok, let’s stop with this bullshit and back to develop.

Basically, the Elementary OS is over GTK 3 and uses Vala as main language (or not a language) to develop it’s applications. The Elementary “Getting Starter” section for developers already conduces you through very detailed steps to build your first app and to get involved with this magic enviroment.

In the end you get a very nice hello world simple app and a few resources. It’s a very nice experience to see your work running natively.

But I found that the steps are too much detailed, not that it’s bad but sometimes I would like to do it more quickly as I already know many of these basic stuff. Also, in sometimes I felt a little lost, so in the end, I decided to make a simple to-do list of the summary of how to setup a new enviroment to a new project, check it out:

sudo apt install elementary-sdkIt will install all dependencies to compile your app.
Just need to do this step at the first time, don’t need it on your second project.